Jemele Hill wouldn’t be surprised if President Donald Trump went to jail.
“His hatred for Obama was more important to him than governing the country and there’s going to be a price to pay for that,” Hill said on a recent episode of the Daniel Artest Podcast. “And it will be significant. And if he winds up behind a jail cell … oh well, because, that could be his destination.”
How did we get here?
On September 11, 2017, Hill called Trump a “white supremacist” via Twitter.
@DonnyParlock @demillz84 @JayG34 Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.
Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Hill’s thoughts “a fireable offense by ESPN” and Trump himself addressed Hill’s comments and shared that he thought that Hill, a recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists journalist of the year award in 2018, owed him an apology.
“My comments on Twitter expressed my personal beliefs,” she said. “My regret is that my comments and the public way I made them painted ESPN in an unfair light. My respect for the company and my colleagues remains unconditional.”
No Love Lost Between the Two
Hill strongly expressed her disapproval for Trump, especially in his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
“I want him to be accountable for the fact that we have almost a quarter of a million people dead from COVID-19,” Hill told Artest. She went on:
And this is not to say that he could’ve saved every life, but it is to say that general attitude and mentality, unfortunately it was poisonous, you know? Part of the reason why we are literally – we had the worst response of any developed nation is because of him and I don’t think he understands the amount of political division; racial division that he has caused in this country.
There’s no way that he understands the gravity of what he’s done. It’s beyond just COVID-19. It’s like he’s disrupted our way of democracy. I mean, think about it even now; he’s refusing to concede and calling it a rigged election and because of that, he has now stirred a hornet’s nest of people who do not believe in truth. And so for him completely exploiting that has done irreparable damage to the presidency and to this democracy.
And I guess that would be my main message to him is have him understand what he has done. I mean, thousands of people have died because he was an irresponsible and incompetent jackass! That’s on you, okay? That is on no one else and so, I think he needs to feel the weight of that and I don’t know what’s going to happen after he finally, eventually leaves office but, if he thinks that people are just going to readily welcome him back, like he was before the presidency; when he was this fun celebrity that people wanted to hang out with – that is over with because I don’t think he will understand until maybe he leaves office and see that vitriolic reaction to him and then he’ll really understand how much he has destroyed people’s lives and for no other reason than petty, spiteful, jealousy and hatred.
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